Ars Technica OS X Lion review e-book, PDF available

Our 27,000 word review of the new OS X Lion is out, but you don't have to read …

Mac OS X Lion is finally here, and that can only mean one thing—it's time for John Siracusa's 27,000-word review of this biggest of the "big cats." The piece is an absolutely terrific read, so we wanted to offer you another way to strongly support such longform, in-depth content on Ars.

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Ars Technica OS X Lion review in e-book formats, as well as PDF. There are two ways to get it:

Subscribe to Ars: Subscribers to Ars Technica get all sorts of great benefits, including a total absence of ads on the site and full-text RSS feeds, for $50 per year—less than $5 per month. But they also get access to PDF versions of our feature stories (usually more than 15 per month). In the case of the Lion review, we are making a combined PDF/ePUB e-book/MOBI e-book archive available free of charge to subscribers (click the link in the upper right of any page on the Lion review). Print out the piece or read it on your Kindle or Nook or iPad—it's included free with your yearly sub.

I'd love to get an ePub version for iBooks. I know I could subscribe and get the PDF, but that's not as nice, and I also don't want to subscribe (I just want to buy this review for iBooks, just like you have the option to do so for Kindle).

I just bought a Python book by O'Reilly – over 1100 pages of content, excluding TOC and index, for US$35. John's review of Lion can't be over 100 pages. I'm sorry, but $5 for less than 100 pages of content ain't gonna cut it for me. And don't forget, the screen shots will be in monochrome on the Kindle, which means a lot of information about the UI changes will be lost.

And blowing $5/mo for a subscription just to get the review in pdf format isn't worth it either – been there, done that. The "features" that you get for an Ars subscription are just gimmicks. (Ad-free layouts? So? I just ignore the ads. Single-page articles? So? Do I really want a 27,000 word article on one scroll-until-the-end-of-time page that I can't navigate? Member-only forums? So? There's nothing on the member-only forums that I can't get elsewhere on the 'nets.)

Based on the prices of the Kindle editions of O'Reilly books, I'd pay a maximum of $3 for the Lion review.

I'd love to support the author as well (sole reason to 'buy' a review), but I'm not willing to buy a subscription, nor am I willing to get a Kindle-version (or a Kindle app for my iPad.

So currently I don't get the point:- It's not available over here at Amazon/Germany- It's not available as iBook (or pdf-download)- It's not available on the Appstore- I am required to use a Kindle or Kindle.app to read..

Considering the fact, that Lion is an Apple product, it seems, that this is not the best strategy to let me support the author....

Bought the Amazon e-book and used the Kindle app on the iPad to view...great review, not so great app (compared to iBooks).

Few suggestions/comments for the next Siracusa-review-a-thon:

- Seperate the geekie stuff into its own sections of the review. I do like reading it, but in hindsight I'd prefer if the upfront, user facing changes were distinguished away from the back-end, inner workings. Maybe seperate the two between free and paid versions (I doubt any non nerds are buying a subscription or the e-Book/PDF)- The comparison screenshots between old and new UI elements are great. Please expand on this as much as possible.- What's your opinion on how this upgrade stacks up with the others? Maybe a ranking of some kind?- For compare and constrasts purposes for section topics, maybe post up each of the elements Apple presents in its keynotes and compare what they said and how it works to how it actually works. Ex: The versioning/autosave feature section can start of with a few sentences and a pic of the slides they show, then dive deep into its actually implementation. I thought this was how the layout was going to work when the review started...would have liked to have seen more of it.

Purchase at $4.99+tax worked fine for me (I'm in the US) and downloaded automatically to Kindle for Android on my phone. Unfortunately the Cmd symbol just shows up as a box, but other than that looks great. A larger Kindle-formatted Table of Contents would be nice.

I live in Italy and here Amazon's price for the review is $ 8.04, VAT and "free international wireless delivery" (whatever it means) included.Very bad. I wanted to buy the ebook, but I regret being charged +60% by Amazon.Is this the ebook revolution?